Industrial robotic automation has seen significant adoption in large-scale manufacturing for tasks such as welding, cutting, stamping, painting, heavy material handling, precision material machining, and the like. Robotic automation in manufacturing offers many benefits, such as higher productivity, lower production costs, better quality, greater consistency, and the like. However, robotic automation comes with a hefty price tag. Enterprises engaging in large-scale manufacturing can leverage scale of production to amortize high initial costs and overhead associated with robotic automation. Therefore, for large-scale manufacturing enterprises, benefits of robotic automation justify its hefty price tag.
Successful adoption of robotic automation in large-scale manufacturing has led to a long-standing desire for small and medium-sized manufacturing enterprises (“SMEs”) to also significantly adopt robotic automation. However, SMEs typically engage in manufacturing processes at smaller scales, and thus SMEs are less able to leverage production scale to amortize high initial costs and overhead associated with robotic automation. Therefore, there is a need for apparatus and methods for overcoming these and other problems presented by the prior art.